The current climate of cruelty in our social worlds can leave us frustrated and scrambling to respond in ways that embrace the ethos and praxis of CMM. My personal frustration makes it tempting, at times, to abandon the desire to respond thoughtfully and, instead, to react emotionally to the fear and anger I feel, especially knowing that people who employ and support the use of institutional and systemic cruelty to achieve moral, intellectual and political domination don’t seem to be interested in listening to speech that opposes or impedes them.

We are all by now aware that a deep well of hatred for the weak and vulnerable exists and is often used to attack those who stand with the disadvantaged and dispossessed. The question is why? What makes cruelty attractive? What makes domination seem necessary?

Do those who support the cruel treatment of the weak and vulnerable feel weak and vulnerable themselves? This may be an under-appreciated aspect of cruelty. It does seem that people we so easily label “haters” have wanted since forever to teach the rest of us what weakness and vulnerability feel like. What if the way we feel now is the way they have felt all their lives? Scared (for ourselves and/or for those we love), alienated, marginalized, disrespected, mocked, inferior, outmaneuvered, prohibited, devalued, irrelevant, frustrated, misunderstood, preyed upon…

The list is long and, I think, familiar to most of us who dwell in a climate of polarization, regardless of our cultural and political affiliations.

Strong emotions can’t be reasoned away. If an “effective” response to cruelty can be made, it won’t be well-reasoned, academic or intellectual. That’s not to say that intellectual and academic interests shouldn’t be pursued–that’s one of the most important freedoms we have and must defend—but if those are the paths by which we seek to engage with the historically weak and fearful who find themselves in a position to lash out against other weak and fearful groups and individuals, we may be wasting valuable time. We can’t conduct a one-sided management of meaning.

If the opposite of cruelty is kindness, then kindness must be extended even to the incorrigibly cruel. Kindness might mean sheltering the targets of cruelty or standing in the way of cruelty, and brave people are doing that. We can be brave, we can support the brave, we can surround targets with our bodies if we have to, we can tell brave stories, and we can go about the business of CMM as if our social worlds were not under constant threat.

Or we can hunker down, stay low, keep doing the work, prepare ourselves for civil collapse, even war, and hope enough of us are still around to pick up the pieces once evil exhausts itself (as I hope and believe it will…eventually).

Patti Digh posits what she calls “radical tenderness” as her best response to cruelty, saying, “It’s about meeting the world—and ourselves—with fierce compassion, especially when it’s hardest to do so. When the easy thing would be to shut down, lash out, or walk away, radical tenderness invites us to stay soft. Not soft like fragile. Soft like brave and porous.” She reminds us that “people act out of pain more often than malice. That doesn’t mean harm is okay—but it does mean we can choose to respond with understanding instead of punishment. We can say: This hurt. And I still see your humanity. That is hard to do; that takes practice.”

That practice is deeply aligned with the practice of CMM. Digh describes “radical tenderness as a way to build something better: not just justice that punishes, but justice that heals.” The healing potential of relationally responsible justice is a major theme in Robyn Penman’s new book, Justice in the Making: Relating, Participating, Communicating, in which she asserts that we are daily responsible for creating justice in our social worlds by showing respect to others. I may find it difficult to respect people who engage in or cheer on acts of cruelty, but self-respect requires it of me.

This is one reason why, in the parlance of CMM, (M)mystery is held as the ultimate priority. I may not and most often cannot know the intergenerational stories that provoke a group or an individual to commit specific acts of cruelty. I do know that just behavior—whether sheltering the targeted or standing in the way of bullying—neither requires me nor qualifies me to devalue the humanity of the one doing the bullying.

Vin Jensen

https://pattidigh.substack.com/p/radical-tenderness-is-a-practice
https://cmminstitute.org/justice-in-the-making